I Didn’t Want to Go to Hell

One thing I learned from the cult of my youth: Dressing lies pretty don’t make it the truth

Joel Michael Herbert
Human Parts
Published in
4 min readMay 23, 2019

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Photo: Jenny Getter/EyeEm/Getty Images

When I was 7 years old
I walked down an aisle
Because I didn’t want to
Go to hell
What a thing to tell a kid
And as long as I can remember
I wondered
If anyone could break the spell
Of the shame I felt

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Joel Michael Herbert
Human Parts

Husband. Father. Artist. Storyteller. Armchair Theologian. Advocate, activist and politician. Gryffindor. [neuro]Divergent.